engaged in toiling steadily up a slight incline toward a larger goal. My father would not have said he wanted to be rich, or even that he wanted to own the largest farm in the county or possess the round, impressive number of a thousand acres.
He would not have invoked the names of his children or a desire to bequeath to us something substantial.
Possibly he would have named nothing at all, except keeping up with the work, getting in a good crop, making a good appearance among his neighbors. But he always spoke of the land his grandparents found with distaste those gigantic gallinippers, snakes everywhere, cattails, leeches, mud puppies, malaria, an expanse of winter ice skateable, in I 889, from Cabot east, across our land, all the way to Columbus, ten miles away. Although I liked to think of my Davis great-grandparents seeking the American promise, which is only possibilities, and 1 enjoyed the family joke of my grandfather Cook finding possibilities where others saw a cheat, I was uncomfortably aware that my father always sought impossibility, and taught us, using the Ericsons as his example, to do the same-to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.
I loved going over to the Ericsons', and Ruthie was my best friend.
One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate.
The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.
Of course, I remember this so clearly because we were severely punished for wandering orf, for crossing the road, for climbing onto the well grate, though I don't actually remember the punishment, only the sudden appearance of my mother, in an apron with a yellow Mexican hat appliqued onto it. Maybe because I knew we were going to be punished, I remember looking at Ruthie's intent face and her lingers releasing something through the holes of the grate, and feeling love for her.
To go over to the Ericsons', to laugh at the dogs, to eat the ice cream or a piece of cake, to ride the ponies, to sit too long in Dinah's closet window seat, was to flirt with danger on the one hand, and to step downward or backward on the other. To bring Ruthie to my house, no matter how we ended up occupying ourselves, was to do her character development a favor that it was nevertheless impolite to mention.
IT DID 0CCUR to me that we wouldn't want the problem with Caroline to affect our usual routine, so when it was my turn to have Daddy over for supper, the Tuesday night after the property transfer, I cooked what I always did for him-pork chops baked with tomatoes (my third-to-last quart from the year before), fried potatoes, a salad, and two or three different kinds of pickles. Part of a sweet potato pie was left from a few nights before.
Daddy ate at our house on Tuesdays, Rose's on Fridays. Even that made him impatient. He expected to come in at live and sit right down to the table. When he was finished, he drank a cup of coffee and went home. Maybe twice a year we persuaded him to watch something on television with us, but if it didn't come right on after supper, he paced around the house as if he couldn't find a place to
He would not have invoked the names of his children or a desire to bequeath to us something substantial.
Possibly he would have named nothing at all, except keeping up with the work, getting in a good crop, making a good appearance among his neighbors. But he always spoke of the land his grandparents found with distaste those gigantic gallinippers, snakes everywhere, cattails, leeches, mud puppies, malaria, an expanse of winter ice skateable, in I 889, from Cabot east, across our land, all the way to Columbus, ten miles away. Although I liked to think of my Davis great-grandparents seeking the American promise, which is only possibilities, and 1 enjoyed the family joke of my grandfather Cook finding possibilities where others saw a cheat, I was uncomfortably aware that my father always sought impossibility, and taught us, using the Ericsons as his example, to do the same-to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.
I loved going over to the Ericsons', and Ruthie was my best friend.
One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate.
The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.
Of course, I remember this so clearly because we were severely punished for wandering orf, for crossing the road, for climbing onto the well grate, though I don't actually remember the punishment, only the sudden appearance of my mother, in an apron with a yellow Mexican hat appliqued onto it. Maybe because I knew we were going to be punished, I remember looking at Ruthie's intent face and her lingers releasing something through the holes of the grate, and feeling love for her.
To go over to the Ericsons', to laugh at the dogs, to eat the ice cream or a piece of cake, to ride the ponies, to sit too long in Dinah's closet window seat, was to flirt with danger on the one hand, and to step downward or backward on the other. To bring Ruthie to my house, no matter how we ended up occupying ourselves, was to do her character development a favor that it was nevertheless impolite to mention.
IT DID 0CCUR to me that we wouldn't want the problem with Caroline to affect our usual routine, so when it was my turn to have Daddy over for supper, the Tuesday night after the property transfer, I cooked what I always did for him-pork chops baked with tomatoes (my third-to-last quart from the year before), fried potatoes, a salad, and two or three different kinds of pickles. Part of a sweet potato pie was left from a few nights before.
Daddy ate at our house on Tuesdays, Rose's on Fridays. Even that made him impatient. He expected to come in at live and sit right down to the table. When he was finished, he drank a cup of coffee and went home. Maybe twice a year we persuaded him to watch something on television with us, but if it didn't come right on after supper, he paced around the house as if he couldn't find a place to
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